Rosaliy
Just before Drake tumbled from the sky and well before being inadvertently blasted out of the sky by Shrilynda, Rosaliy made her way through the halls of the crumbling palace turned pirate stronghold.
"This all seems too easy," Rosaliy mumbled as she and Jadelynn ladled healing potion into a little jar Jadelynn had stashed in a scarf tied around her waist. Sure, there had been plenty of menacing-looking pirates patrolling the halls, but they were no match for an invincible invisible bubble. All it had taken was to knock over a chair down the hallway from the conspicuously guarded treasure room to convince the guard to check a room around the corner. Then they closed the door on him and broke the lock. Jadelynn's extensive expertise with older brothers and mean pranks had come in handy. Rosaliy made a mental note to thank her brother for not being a psychopath.
"You'll make up for it getting to Flifary Island," Jadelynn chattered, taking back the full jar. "How do you expect to wrangle the Granpulpo? Queen Kat talked to us about it one time when we were studying magical creatures. She said it was huge and easily angered."
Rosaliy had no real answer. The second they stumbled across the information in their research, Cliff and Jadelynn were sure a giant octopus was the best way to travel. Supposedly, only a magical creature could travel to Flifary Island uninvited, but when that creature was a touchy, giant octopus, she wished she had time to dig for another plan, one involving a boat or magical stones. It was safe to assume Daniella would not have considered travel by giant octopus a legitimate option, so at least Rosaliy had the supposed power of unpredictability on her side.
They exited the door, and Rosaliy disentangled the chain of the intricate metal ball from her belt, cupping the twisted metal in her palm. Handling new objects required coming out of the protective bubble—an unfortunate drawback. When the benefit was being invisible and completely safe from everything outside the bubble, that one drawback was surmountable. The dome sprang up just in time for them to slide by one very angry pirate yelling to a few more to split up and search the castle.
"I doubt they'll be searching where we're going," Jadelynn giggled quietly. The urge to whisper unnecessarily was too hard to overcome.
They sped through the palace. Outside the ballroom, the pirates had let most of the palace fall into disrepair. They had tracked sand everywhere and redecorated with whale bones and mounted cutlasses.
"Does it ever make you sad?" Rosaliy asked as they walked past a wall-sized nautical map affixed to the wall with knives.
"You should hear Matias whine," Jadelynn giggled. "No, they can do what they want to the place."
"If things had gone differently, you could have lived here. I think, in your place, I might be inclined to resent the pirates."
"Hmm," Jadelynn hummed with a sideways grin, pointing at a jewel-encrusted chandelier being used to support one end of a rope hammock. "Not really. I see how much pressure Lillya is under. I mean, poor girl can't even go camping without somebody trying to kidnap her. My mom still doesn't get to make choices for herself. I couldn't do it. I'd snap and run away, probably. Instead, I get to train to be a Sorceress. I feel like it was what I was meant to do, you know?"
Rosaliy did know. "Magic is in your blood. It is what you were meant to do." She told a new group of girls exactly that every year, and she meant it every time.
Another hallway's decor consisted of bottles hanging from the ceiling with ropes.
"Abuelo would be spinning in his grave if he could see this, though," Jadelynn whispered, like whispering would give away their position less than shouting at this moment.
Finally, they found the sealed wing. Sealed was not the right word, considering the only barriers were a few tables someone had hacked the word "NO" onto. The stairs were too great an obstacle for the flat bottom of the dome, unfortunately. The first time they tried to go up, the dome slid straight through. They had to backtrack, and Rosaliy had to abandon the enchantment, retying the metal ball securely around her belt. They were so close anyway.
"Good thing Sorceress Issabeth makes us run stairs every day," Jadelynn sighed. "She always says if you're not prepared to run up ten flights of stairs in an emergency, you're not prepared for anything."
That did sound like the High Sorceress.
"Hey," barked a voice down a distant hallway. "I heard something in the cursed wing."
Jadelynn moaned. "Can we not tell the Sorceress she was right?"
Rosaliy would have agreed wholeheartedly, but she was busy running up what must have been a thousand stairs. Jadelynn kept pace, and eventually they were at the top, panting. If Issabeth could have seen them, they would both have been assigned strict new training regimes as punishment. Rosaliy managed to close her fingers around the metal ball before three pirates crested the stairs, weapons drawn. Up close, the pirates—two men and a woman—were menacing. Where the Crocs had given the impression of trying to look tougher than they were, these pirates were exactly as tough as they looked. Their spiked boots and copious weaponry were less decorative and more a lifestyle. The woman was her own brand of fierce. She looked like one of those swamp flowers that tempted travelers with its colored leaves and wafting smell, just to devour them when they got too close.
"Room by room," ordered the woman. She rolled her r's like they were the ocean itself. "Flush 'em toward the sea."
"We toss 'em over when we find 'em?" asked one of the men. "Or you in the mood to chat?"
"They're interrupting my busy evening of devouring canapes by the trayful," she groused in reply. "I'm in the mood to gut them and hang them from the South Turret."
The questioner pushed open the first room with the blade of a withdrawn knife. "Hello?" he called. "Anybody in here? Just looking for a partner for a rousing game of bladelings. No?"
"I don't like bein' up here, Es," whined the other pirate. "These hallways are cursed by the spirits of—"
"You can stop right there, Harl," she cut him off. "There are no roaming spirits down these hallways unless you count rats and gulls. Plenty of those."
"Then why don't no one ever come in here?" he shot back.
"Cause you blasted a hole in the side of the castle eight years back, locoburro," she scoffed. "Don't make me waste energy on threatening you."
"I wish mom would let me put streaks in my hair like Esmona's," Jadelynn sighed, eying the woman's dramatic teal hair.
Esmona? Oh.
"We need to get past them before they beat us to the secret room," was what Rosaliy said out loud, although her thoughts were quite different.
They waited until the pirates had cleared the hallway and made for the end, hopping over wide cracks in a crumbling floor. The dome may have carried them safely across, but the drop to the swelling ocean below was alarming enough to convince Rosaliy not to take the chance. Rosaliy had to relinquish the ball so they could try the door. She bit back a cry of dismay. The wall to this room had been ripped away, plus the entire adjoining room. There was no way to go further from here. To add insult, Jadelynn pointed. Directly across this pirate-created chasm, Rosaliy could see the space between the floor they were on and the floor above. The secret room was so close, but there was no way to reach it from here.
